w/ Derek Miller, Genius Lab Gear
Get ready to put on your lab coat and nerd out with the founder and CEO of Genius Lab Gear, Derek Miller, on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. Derek spills the beans on his journey from making stickers to creating the world's best lab coat. But that's not all - he's taking a unique approach to launching his latest product by crowdsourcing the design and crowdfunding the manufacturing of lab coats with his community of fans. and creating a carbon-neutral with Shopify Planet. So grab your pipettes and get ready to learn this proven pre-order launch process.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
May 16, 2023
Kurt Elster: Hello, and welcome back to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, where we talk to entrepreneurs making their way on Shopify. And today, we are talking to Derek Miller, the Founder & CEO of Genius Lab Gear. Derek is a scientist turned entrepreneur and he is on a mission to make scientific research easier and more enjoyable for scientists by reinventing laboratory tools. We’re gonna hear about his latest product launch, where he is taking a unique approach by crowdsourcing the design and crowdfunding the manufacturing of lab coats. I am excited to dig into that.
I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: And this is The Unofficial Shopify Podcast.
Sound Board:
Kurt Elster: Derek, welcome.
Derek Miller: Thanks. I’m excited to be here, Kurt.
Kurt Elster: You know, my honor and pleasure to have you here, because I was on your site and I noticed you sell a variety of items that appear to be machined, anodized aluminum. Coming from automotive, coming from biking, coming from RC, so many of my hobbies, anodized aluminum products tickle my brain. They’re always cool.
Derek Miller: I love it. And I’ll tell you why I did it, is because when I started the business, my first few product ideas were more about… They were more intricate, and they needed injection molding. And then I found out that the injection molds cost like $30,000, and I didn’t have an audience, I didn’t have any website traffic, so I had to nix that. And anodized aluminum sheet metal parts are much cheaper to manufacture in small volumes, and so we could get 100, 200 at a time just by bending some sheet metal and anodizing it into all the prettiest colors you can imagine.
Kurt Elster: And then, of course, laser engraving your logo on there.
Derek Miller: That’s the most fun part.
Kurt Elster: Just machined metal in bright colors… I’m like a child. Just me, I’m like, “Oh, I should play with this toy.” Okay, so let’s start at the top. What does Genius Lab Gear sell?
Derek Miller: So, it kind of comes from my background. I’ve spent my whole life in scientific research. I’m a materials scientist and engineer by training. And in all of the labs that I’ve worked in, it’s been a consistent theme of just constant frustration. That is the everyday laboratory research experience. Things rarely go well. And the tools that scientists and engineers normally use are… They’re designed to do the thing well that it’s supposed to do, and they’re not designed to help the person do the thing well, and so I wanted to focus on making some clever tools and accessories that help make laboratory research easier for the person.
So, not big scientific machinery. Just small, clever, helpful things that make your day a little bit easier in the lab.
Kurt Elster: I like the idea. Certainly, if you’re in a space, and you are an expert there, and you go, “Look, I’ve got these everyday pains. I can see colleagues and friends having the same issues. I can figure out a better way to do this.” And you are a… You said material science engineer?
Derek Miller: Yeah. That’s right.
Kurt Elster: So, certainly that, I think, gives you a leg up here, and an understanding of manufacturing more so than the average person, I would suspect. That’s gotta be so open ended. Once you have made that decision, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? How do you decide?
Derek Miller: You have to go into the lab, and you have to watch people work. And you have to see where they run into problems and then address it. And that’s what I did. The anodized aluminum part you were talking about, somebody was using a piece of cut-out Styrofoam as a prop to hold up a cell culture plate in their lab, and it wasn’t even what they were showing me. I asked them to tell me their problems and they were showing me some other things, and I saw this person in the corner doing this, and I said, “Wait a second. What are they doing over there? Why are they using a piece of crumbly Styrofoam in their fume hood?” And that turned out to be my first real laboratory research product, and it was again, just make a tilted plate holder out of anodized aluminum, and I went back to deliver the final product to them like three months later and they were still using the 3D-printed plastic part that I had given them to test, which was degrading because it gets UV toast every night when they try to clean out the hood.
So, that was how I knew that I really solved the problem for them, is when they were still using the crappy 3D-printed part three months later.
Kurt Elster: The prototype? What material did you use for the 3D-printed part?
Derek Miller: It was just some standard PLA, and I went on Shapeways, and put in the CAD model, and they shipped it to me pretty inexpensively.
Kurt Elster: Oh. Yeah, before I owned a 3D printer, which is like an exercise in frustration. You’re gonna spend six to 12 months just trying to figure it out. Prior to that, I would order stuff, models, off Shapeways. It’s great. I’m saying this for our listeners’ benefit that if you’re like, “Man, I wish I could just prototype this quickly,” Shapeways does it and it’s like 10 bucks for a small model. It’s really… It’s quite affordable.
Derek Miller: It’s gotten so much easier. Yeah. If you’re only gonna do a few rounds of it, just hire it out. It’s not expensive at all.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Oh, for sure. So, you create this first product, but then, of course, the question is always who’s gonna buy it. Who’s gonna care? Once you have made this product, which if we want people to visualize it, imagine phone stand. That’s the closest idea here. Who are you selling it to? Who’s the audience? Or how do you get the audience?
Derek Miller: Actually, I tried a lot of different things when I started, and the thing that actually stuck is I designed a few stickers. After failing at the injection mold blocks, I just said, “Let’s just do stickers. Let’s keep it simple.” And where I finally got traction was I interacted with some groups on Instagram that were more cause based. They were… One was about mental health in grad school. Another one was for the LGBT community in scientific research. And they wanted… They needed to raise funds. They needed to do a fundraiser. And so, all they had was an Instagram account and a basic WordPress website, and I said, “I have a tool called Shopify, which I can use to host your fundraiser if you’d like, and I can handle all the admin work, and all the order fulfillment, and I’ll give you all of the proceeds, and we’ll just put it up on my website and you drive traffic to my website, and we’ll do the fundraiser that way.”
And so, the first one I raised $2,000 on selling $5 stickers for this group, and they drove 300, 500 orders to my website when I was getting maybe one a week before that. I didn’t really make any money off those stickers, but every once in a while somebody would pick up something else that they saw on the website that they liked. I had some print-on-demand products to go along with them. And it built a lot of good will and introduced people to my brand, and then from there, then I had the 1,500 followers on Instagram, that kind of core foundation that I could start to interact more, engage more with the community, and build out some more product ideas, and get them more engaged in what kinds of things we should approach next.
Kurt Elster: So, by helping these people out at breakeven with cause marketing using something simple like stickers, which… Were these print on demand?
Derek Miller: No. They can be. They can be print on demand for $5, and there’s only maybe a dollar margin on that, but you can get them for 50 cents on Sticker Mule, a couple hundred at a time, and so selling them for $5, the margin… I was getting $2 to $3 to the organization for every sticker sold. And Redbubble is what a lot of people would use. I looked at their margins and they were terrible, so they actually made more money per sticker selling it on my website and me sending them the profits than if they did it themselves through say Redbubble.
Kurt Elster: Oh. Yeah, because Redbubble, it functions like print on demand marketplace.
Derek Miller: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: Versus like on Shopify, if you want to sell a sticker, A, we can just… You could source and list the sticker. And you’re right, I’ve gotten plenty of stickers made with Sticker Mule. They’re good. But you can also do print on demand with stickers, as well. But just it… The unit cost does not make sense.
Derek Miller: It doesn’t make sense.
Kurt Elster: For them to fulfill an individual die cut sticker is gonna be 10X if you just had them send you a stack of 50 stickers.
Derek Miller: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: And usually it’s like the minimum order quantity, not crazy. It’s like 50 and you can usually, if you’re a first-time customer, find several coupons and pay like 30 bucks.
Derek Miller: Exactly. Yeah. There were promotions. Sometimes I’d get like 50 for $20 or something. Just to test out a new sticker.
Kurt Elster: And so, you’re able to assist these folks with a fundraising campaign, and in doing so, you have built… You start to acquire an audience. Got 1,500 people on Instagram. Now we’ve got some traction there. And so, do you start seeing that translate to orders for that original core product, the petri dish stand?
Derek Miller: So, what I did from there is I was still kind of searching for what other products could I make that are simple, but I don’t want to be a sticker store. There were other people doing stickers very well on Shopify, on Instagram, in the scientific community, and they were much better graphic designers than I was. I don’t want to be a sticker store. I don’t want to be a t-shirt store. I want to make actual lab products.
So, I was just kind of browsing around. I’m trying to see what can I reinvent and make specifically for my audience. What’s something simple that I can take, and I can just customize it and make it 10 times better for one specific type of person? And what I ended up making was basically a metal pocket tool. And so, it’s the size of a credit card, and the first one I made was called the Pocket Scientist, which was a play on the rocket scientist, and it was… It’s a ruler, it’s a stencil, it’s got a protractor/compass on it, and it’s got a ton of reference information that a scientist might use in their everyday job. So, periodic table, other physical constants, Planck’s constant, things like that, and some equations.
That was the first one that I made and that one did okay. I just kind of came out, “Tada, here it is. Here’s this thing I made,” which wasn’t the best approach. But what actually did better was when, and you might think scientist is niche, but it was actually too broad. When I made the next one, the Pocket Chemist, that one did even better. And then I made the Pocket Engineer, which is the top selling one right now, and then the Pocket Physicist. And so, by niching down even more than that, it was tuned more specifically to a specific person, and that really is what built the foundation of my business right now and let me grow the audience, grow the revenue, and approach some of the more difficult problems in the future.
Kurt Elster: And so, the issue here was scientist was too broad. To a layperson, it doesn’t sound broad, and immediately I picture a dude in a lab coat, but the reality is that’s like saying professional. It’s just too broad a label where the people you’re targeting might work in the scientific field but identify as chemists, not scientists.
Derek Miller: Exactly. I mean, a lot of people identify as a scientist, but it’s just too broad. You know, if you take the fitness community, for instance, you might say you’re into fitness, but are you into CrossFit or are you into yoga, right? Those are very different things, and they need different products for them. And so, to everyone outside of this niche, scientist is niche, but to me it’s the whole niche. It’s much too broad and we gotta go even deeper.
And so, even further, I was recently trying to make a Pocket Biologist, and I posted about it on Reddit, and everybody said, “That’s too broad. You need to go Pocket Microbiologist, Pocket Molecular Biologist, Pocket Biochemist.” Those are all very different subsets. And the nice thing is with these specific products, the MOQs are low enough that I can start to address those individually without dumping a ton of money into it.
Kurt Elster: And so, they’re like credit card size, they’re laser cut metal cards, they’re neat. How did you figure out that you had gone too broad? And then once you did, how do you know where to go? You’re not a paleontologist. How would you know what goes into that product or even that there are enough paleontologists that they’ll buy this product?
Derek Miller: Yeah. Well, I figured out the best way is just to ask them. And so, through my Instagram connections, and then later on Twitter, then now my email list, I have a pretty good network of people I can reach out to to start to get help on these. So, the first couple I designed myself, because that was my background. And I started to get a little bit out of my comfort zone technically, and I wasn’t exactly sure, and so I had to talk to both teachers and professionals about what would be put onto these cards. What’s useful? What you would need in your everyday work. And most recently, I just announced the Pocket Paleontologist, and in that email, instead of saying here’s a new product, go buy it, I said, “Here’s the newest product we made and here’s the person that helped us make it, and here’s the process we went through to make it together.” And that was the whole email. And here’s why we decided to include everything on it.
So, less salesy, more about the story of the product, and at the end I said, “By the way, we have at least 10 more ideas we want to do for these. If you’re an expert, contact us.” And the next day I had four or five new emails in my inbox of experts in each field ready and willing to help out to help me make a new one.
Kurt Elster: That is phenomenal. And so, you sorted through those, and you shared those stories. This adds legitimacy, authenticity, interest?
Derek Miller: Exactly. Yeah. Because obviously we can’t be experts in all of these fields, and so we started naming, tagging the experts in the fields that have actually helped us make it, and design it, and that’s gone a long way for the credibility.
Kurt Elster: And the other thing I noticed that I think adds credibility is for each of these cards, because essentially if I’m just squinting it’s all the same product, but you have these really cool lifestyle photos that speak to it, like the paleontologist tool is surrounded by fossils, and a pick, and a brush, and the engineering one has a really cool Cree LED flashlight I recognize right away, and a 10-millimeter bit, that kind of thing.
Are you doing the photos?
Derek Miller: Oh yeah. Doing it all myself. It’s been a progression, but you know, a Sony camera off Facebook Marketplace, some props, a few YouTube videos. It’s not that hard to get decent photos up there by yourself. I just… You know, I do a lot of these things myself, and so I just rummage around through all my stuff, and I pull out, “Oh, I’ve got a soldering iron. I’ve got some wire over here. I’ve some molecular models over here from that one time I did an outreach demo.” So, I just kind of put it all together, get some old textbooks. The fossils, I had to order on Amazon, which I didn’t know you could order real million-year-old fossils on Amazon.
And then just set up a scene, you know? I used gravel from my backyard to make it look real. And I got some comments, the paleontologist that made it for me, he’s gonna take it out in the field and take some more images for me, but he said mine were already so good he wasn’t sure he needed to.
Kurt Elster: And I noticed in the Pocket Engineer one, there’s like… We got some six-point sockets here, or eight-point sockets.
Derek Miller: Yeah. And someone said that the engineer is actually even too broad, right? I’ve gotten suggestions to go much deeper in that, as well. But you know, for the function, it’s for anybody who’s doing hands-on work.
Kurt Elster: And the other thing that’s fascinating about this, you’re talking about how laser focused it is, but you’re actually… These products have quite a few reviews. We’re talking about the engineering version. It’s got almost 40 5-star reviews. That’s not easy to do.
Derek Miller: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. And it’s actually only 20 to 30% of my sales are actually on Shopify. I also started selling these on Amazon after much angst about being copied and ripped off, and on Amazon it’s up to 300. It’s pegged the best gift for engineers, Amazon’s Choice. So, that was a huge one for me, and the reviews just keep coming in there, so that’s all the social proof I need to go out there and continue to sell them.
Kurt Elster: Oh, that’s fabulous. Congratulations.
Derek Miller: Thank you.
Kurt Elster: Is there crossover? Do you see people who receive this as a gift, or purchase on Amazon, do they join your newsletter, follow? Do you keep those customers?
Derek Miller: I try my best, and that’s a hard one. One kind of Jedi trick I did is I laser engraved a QR code onto the product itself. So, Amazon doesn’t like you putting inserts.
Kurt Elster: Oh, yeah. I just noticed that.
Derek Miller: Yeah. Amazon does not like you putting inserts into there, asking them to go to your Shopify website, but I laser engraved a QR code, which goes to a special page, and I update that page every month with new discounts, company news, I put a funny science cartoon in there and a couple other tools and resources that I’ve dug up, so that’s the incentive, and I get I’d say probably 5% to 10% of my Amazon sales end up using that QR code at least once and going to the website. And then on the website, on that page, there’s an email capture form and an exit intent form.
So, I’m trying to pick up as much of that as I can.
Kurt Elster: Well, smart way to do it. And I love the pop-ups on your site. It pops up. It’s got that famous photo of Albert Einstein with his tongue out. It’s great.
Derek Miller: Thanks.
Kurt Elster: In Googling you, I discovered that British media picked you up. You’ve got the BBC, the Telegraph, all have covered what you’re doing. How the heck did you manage that?
Derek Miller: Well, it wasn’t easy. Took a while. It started when… The products that we just talked about are more… They’re fun products. They’re useful products. They’re not cause-based products. And they’re not something that you can easily convince a journalist to talk about for you. And that built the foundation for the product that I really wanted to tackle was from all my experience in science, is lab coats. Lab coats are the bane of most scientists’ existence, even though they wear them every day.
So, what I did is I decided I don’t know how to design the world’s best lab coat, but with maybe 1,000 people’s responses, I could piece together what a good design would look like. So, about a year and a half ago I launched a survey, just Google forms, totally free, and embedded it on my website, and I asked people to tell me about their problems with their lab coat. And it included things like sizes, what’s too big, what’s too small, what pockets do they need, what do they use them for, what colors do they want, and how much are you willing to pay for a lab coat that you think would be great. And probably the most important question on the form was actually I just said, “Rant about your lab coat. Tell us whatever you want. We’re really good listeners.” And that was the most important question I asked because when you do a survey like that, your feedback is limited by your own imagination of what questions you asked.
But when you encourage people to write all their thoughts and feelings out as much as they want in a question towards the end of the survey, you get so much better information. And I was just listening to one of your other podcasts, they talked about customer avatars, and it’s really easy to make your customer avatar when they just write it for you. And so, we got to… It took about a year, but we got to over 1,000 responses. We’re up to 1,500 now and I followed a very specific process. I want to shout out… It’s a free online course on the SEMrush Academy, and it is called Mastering Digital PR with Brian Dean. It kind of talked about how to make a source magnet and how to get people to cover that for you in the press, and how to get people to rally behind it. And so, I decided-
Kurt Elster: Oh, that… Is that Brian Dean from Backlinko?
Derek Miller: Yes. Same Brian.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Yeah. I follow his newsletter because there’s so much snake oil with SEO, so when you find someone you trust, you listen. Brian Dean is one of those people. And he’s been on… I had him as a guest. I was thrilled to have him. Yeah, if he’s got a course out there and it’s free, and it’s on PR-
Derek Miller: It’s totally free.
Kurt Elster: Oh my gosh. I gotta check that out. I will include it in the show notes.
Derek Miller: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: Please continue.
Derek Miller: Yeah. It’s like two hours of video and you just gotta really dig into the exercises. And I followed it exactly. I really committed to it. And so, what I did is I took my survey responses, and I just really crunched the numbers, found something, I pulled out interesting stats. One is like 90% of scientists reported they are unhappy with their lab coats, right? Or 60% of petite women say they can’t find a lab coat small enough for them. Things like that. And worked this into an article about… And this is the key. The article needs to be about the problem, not about the product that you’re gonna use to fix the problem.
And again, it’s a very specific process, and you have to make quotable segments of the article and reshare-able figures. That’s all really important. And so, I wrote up this article using all the data and the quotes made it so much richer than just putting just dry data in. And then I started… I just did the legwork to find on Twitter, and on the internet, emails and handles for journalists of niche industry magazines. So, chemistry magazines, physics magazines, things like that, and I just cold called them, cold emailed them, tweeted at them, and after contacting maybe 40 or 50 of them, I got five to 10 that were interested in covering it. And so, I first just got a couple of offline interviews that turned into articles in those magazines, and then those got picked up, so then the CBC, the Canadian Broadcast Company, asked me to be on their science podcast to talk about the lab coats also.
And then-
Kurt Elster: That’s gotta be huge.
Derek Miller: Yeah. That one… That’s a 60-year-old podcast. It’s called Quirks and Quarks, and so then that got picked up by the BBC. The BBC called me, and they said, “Hey, can we have you on in an hour this afternoon to talk about this? We don’t want to miss our cycle.” And then from there, the Telegraph UK picked that up, and I got great backlinks from every single one of these, which was an added bonus.
And then I’ve just continued to use that article and then spin the data into another new article to try to really hammer about the cause, and it’s key. The podcasts were about the problem and about the people experiencing the problem. And only a little bit at the very end we talk about the lab coat project and the solution I’m coming up with to address it. But you just… If you want, I can give you one more example that’s not about lab coats that might be a little more relatable to most of your audience.
So, you recently had a couple people on, e-bike eCommerce companies. Those are really fun podcasts to listen to. So, your typical marketing might be to say how easy it is to get to work on your bikes, or how much fun it is, or how much money you can save on gas. That’s what you would tell your customers. But instead, to make a caused-based marketing, you could say, “We need 40% of the workforce to commute by bike daily to meet the country’s carbon emission targets.” And then that can become your cause that people can rally behind.
And so, you could survey your audience, you could find publicly available data, you could figure out what the percentage is that we’re at right now. Maybe it’s 5%. You get quotes from your audience on what was the hardest thing about making the switch, why was it worth it, get stats from your audience on how much money the average person is saving after switching, and then that data and those quotes become a more human-focused story that can help you get that press attention. And your brand is just there leading the charge, and so it’s… Again, it’s not about your product. It’s about the problem. And then you just happen to be there coming up with a solution to it.
Kurt Elster: That is so brilliant. That’s the thing people miss. I mean, the issue with what makes a bad pitch bad is it is… It’s not self-aware and it’s self-centered. I’ll get a pitch that’s just like, “Hey, Kurt. Love your podcast. You should put me on it so I can talk about this service I sell.” And that’s like 90% of the pitches we get. And I just delete them because I’m like, “What am I supposed to do with this?” I get how that benefits you. How does that benefit my audience? And whether… Yeah, I’m not a journalist. But I still care about the audience, right? You have to. And most creators, influencers, and certainly journalists and media professionals care about the audience as priority one. That’s the thing that makes them.
And so, when you can have a pitch that speaks to what that audience cares about as opposed to what benefits you, ah, I see the difference, and I see where that’s how people go wrong. No, my follow-up question to that fabulous approach was going to be like what does a good pitch look like? And you’ve touched on it. Any other thoughts there?
Derek Miller: Yeah. I think one thing that made it so powerful for me and going back to square one with a survey, a lot of customer surveys just are gonna get ignored. If you really hit on a problem that deeply affects people, they’re gonna answer the survey for you no matter what. And so, the lab coats were a problem that are so deeply ingrained in people’s day, and how it affects their day… Now, a lot of the responses were very emotional. They were very passionate. They’re like, “This affects my self-esteem. I feel like an imposter. It affects my productivity. I don’t want to go into the lab.” These are really deep.
Kurt Elster: Oh, wow.
Derek Miller: Yeah. Very deep, touching responses. And when it becomes that passion focus, it becomes more of a story. And so, if you want to get the attention, you really have to hit a nerve with what is your survey about and what is it going to address, and then what is… Defining the problem in a way that becomes a more deeply emotional and personal issue for people.
Kurt Elster: I like… Well, you had that great question that adds emotion to it, but it’s open-ended, and you said put it at the end. Because you’re kind of priming the pump a little bit with the initial questions to get them thinking about it, and then at the end, you’re like, “Hey, rant about this.” I love that rant about it as your call to action. And then just leave it open ended.
With 1,500 survey results, how do you go through that in a systematic way? I might try just pasting it all into Chat GPT and being like, “Give me the key points here, buddy.”
Derek Miller: Yeah. I’d say a Red Bull and a free weekend would do it. It was all collected in Google Sheets, and I just had to really parse out the data, just tab, after tab, after tab, pivot tables, pivot tables, and then after all of that data was kind of in place, I read through every single comment, and it was… It takes hours and hours to read through that many freeform responses, but I’d pull those out into a separate document, and kind of organize the responses based on was this from a woman, was it from a man, was it from a chemist, a biologist, was it a funny response, was it an emotional response? Because I’m going to reshare some of those quotes in different ways in the future.
And it takes a lot of time, but you really learn to deeply understand your audience and their problems. Because again, normally you would say, “Look at your reviews to get the language from your customers.” But this is even more emotional and more intimate than reviews. They’re not putting this out there as a performative thing. They’re just telling you like a close friend what they actually think. And you can use that language, and so that is then being rephrased into all of my marketing. Making videos, I read these quotes in videos on my Instagram, and it resonates with people and then they comment, “I have the same problem.”
And that’s… It just takes a lot of time to do it, but overall, for a big project like this, it’s worth it.
Kurt Elster: So, you’ve got… Sending out this survey, what started with the survey and this SEMrush course from Brian Dean turns into you’ve got this incredible resource. A database of people and how they feel, your target market, about this lab coat. And because you are in your target market, you know it. You understand it. That didn’t come out of nowhere. You knew… Apparently, lab coats suck. I did not realize this.
And so, now you have… You’re able to craft a story. You’re able to craft a PR pitch. You’ve got phenomenal content and copywriting that’ll come out of this because of this voice of customer resource. And backlinks. And then I’m sure there’s like a flywheel effect there where you get more and more out of it. But also, really like the core thing we want to do here is develop a new product. It sounds like you’re on a mission to be the Carhartt of lab coats, right? You want to be that beloved workwear. What does that look like? I went on your site. I don’t see a lab coat for sale yet.
Derek Miller: Exactly. I wish it were. I’m getting emails out of left field, “Where can I buy these lab coats?” And I have to keep saying they’re not ready yet. So, designing the product is always difficult, but it becomes a lot easier when people tell you exactly what they want, and so this first version that we’re going to make is meant to be kind of the crowd pleaser, aggregating the data. You know, people can’t get mad at me for the design decisions because it’s literally just how people voted. This is what they want. This is where they want the pockets, how many they want, do they want zippers or snaps. And these are all important design decisions that are going into this.
And further, out of that survey, I took some of the more engaged people and offered to see if they wanted to test the lab coats before the launch. And so, I put together this beta test group of about 30 people that are kind of the biggest fans, and they’re all gonna get a free lab coat, two free lab coats. One for the test and one for the final launch of the final design. And that’s also gonna help turn into my UGC content prelaunch. And so, the design is… Okay, I’m trying to decide what color buttons should I put on it? So, let me launch a poll on Instagram. And then just let people vote. And I got a clear answer. And I was happy to have a very clear answer on Instagram of which one people wanted.
And then what do we name the lab coats? Oh, gosh. What should we call them? And I launched a poll. Should it be Marie Curie? Should it be Rosalind Franklin for the women’s? Should the men’s be Albert Einstein, or should it be Carl Sagan? And I got hundreds of responses to the poll to name the lab coats. Again, just driving it from my email list, from Instagram, from Twitter to embedded things on my website.
And then more recently, I also launched a pocket protector that’s going to pair with the lab coat, and I need to know what colors to make it, and I posted about this on your Facebook group, so someone can go to the Facebook group and reference the process, but I used a utility called PollUnit and that let me embed an upvoting and downvoting utility into my product page. And each item that they can vote on is a color swatch from my manufacturer. And then they can go and upvote or downvote their favorite colors, and so I chose like 12 to start. For instance, other people can add their own, like a feature request, and so 28 people added more colors that they wanted to see, and some of them outperformed the ones that I picked, so apparently I don’t have very good style.
And that’s telling me exactly which three colors I should launch first, and then here’s the laundry list of if I want to add colors later. There they are.
And so, I’m going to do the same thing with feature requests for lab coats, and most importantly, for apparel, the MOQs on these are like 1,000 per gender. The total spend to get a men’s and women’s is going to be like $45,000 up front. And so, I decided to try to crowdfund as much of that as I can, and I set the goal at half, and I’m being very transparent of like, “We need 300 lab coats per gender. That will cover half the manufacturing cost.” And we’re a small business, but we’re gonna take the risk and we’re gonna cover the other half. And I’m telling them exactly how much money that is and exactly how much money each lab coat costs to manufacture.
And so, putting that all together, I say we have to hit 300 or we’re not gonna make this, and so many people are so deeply invested in the success of this project already… I don’t think I have 300 per gender, but they have friends. I have maybe 50 or 100 per gender and they want to see it succeed because they’ve been so deeply involved in the design process, and the decisions, the naming, the colors, everything. And so, the preorder campaign, I’m gonna use the Crowdfunder app embedded in the Shopify store, which basically overlays a widget onto the product page that says you’ve sold 5 or 500 out of your goal, and it puts a time limit on it, and it tells you. It gives you that sense of urgency. We need to hit this goal by this amount of time, and this is how far along you are.
And so, doing that preorder gets people to say, “Oh gosh, we’re only at 100. I need to go find some friends and see if they want to put an order in too, or maybe I should order two because I need one to be clean at all times.” And so, it kind of generates that network effect. Especially with a preorder, scientists, people who wear lab coats, they don’t work by themselves. They work with other people wearing lab coats. And so, all we need is to see one person per lab and get them to go, “Hey guys, we’re 50 short on this preorder. It’s not gonna happen unless you order. Do you want to add a lab coat to my order?” And that’s kind of the network effect we’re going for and using the Crowdfunder app and the preorder campaign to get there.
Kurt Elster: As the gentleman who co-owns the Crowdfunder app, I am so excited by this process and approach, and thrilled to hear it.
Sound Board:
Kurt Elster: So, I think what’s so fascinating to me that you’ve done differently than other people, because we’ve seen a lot of crowdfunding campaigns, is you started with crowdsourcing and not… You did this survey, which is brilliant, but then really extended that crowdsourcing idea out, where it’s like it started with this in-depth survey, and the in-depth survey moved into then these micro polls, where you’re having people vote on individual aspects. So, you really very much involve them to the point where it became this truly community, crowdsourced design product.
And then everybody’s involved, invested emotionally here in creating this, and then we move to crowdfunding. Same deal. The other thing I think that’s brilliant here is up front, you’re telling them these are our costs. This is everything. These are all the details. Entirely truthful, and honest, and authentic, and gets them involved. And then you’re saying, “Hey, our goal is half of what this is gonna cost to make, because we’re gonna have just as much skin in the game as you.”
Derek Miller: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: You gotta write this up as a standard operating procedure and then sell it. I want your two-hour course on this whole process. You could sell that on the site. Would be fantastic.
Derek Miller: Yeah. And really, I plan to repeat this process, right? The first lab coat is a crowd pleaser, but a lot of people say, “We want this, or we want that, or we want a different color,” and I’m just going to launch a poll, figure out what the winner is, then launch a preorder on my website around the winner of that poll, and if it doesn’t meet the order, we won’t make it. And just rinse and repeat and that’s the best way I know to validate the demand, especially for a small business where you can’t just throw 100 grand down on an upcoming product order launch without really testing it ahead of time.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You’re putting in a lot of time and effort up front to ensure this is successful, but you’re hugely mitigating the risk. The cash outlay for you is reduced in this process.
Derek Miller: And you can take it the whole way, and you could preorder. The preorder goal could set up the entire manufacturing run to be funded, right? Just depends on your risk tolerance. And for me, I think if we can get halfway there, I think that’ll be enough of a demand signal to go ahead and make it, and I’m sure we’ll sell the rest.
Kurt Elster: Within the crowdfunding product itself, do you do… Is it just like, “Hey, place your purchase,” it’s one order per coat, and place your order and then we’ll collect the details later? Which is one way you can do it. Or is it like, “Here’s a series of options,” or backer levels? What’s the setup we’re going with?
Derek Miller: Yeah, so people can order as many as they want in one. I’m actually encouraged… So, we’re not doing free shipping. Because I’m publishing the margins and the margins aren’t very good compared to most apparel industry products, I’m publishing the margins. I’m saying, “Here. We can’t offer free shipping because here are the margins and here’s how if we do free shipping and free returns, we won’t make any money and this business will fail.” And I’m being very transparent about that. And so, it’s gonna cost them money for shipping, but if they order more lab coats in one order, the cost for shipping goes down.
And so, I’m encouraging people. I’m saying, “Here’s the shipping cost for one and here’s the shipping cost for 10.” And so, if you get your whole lab to order, you might only pay $2 in shipping instead of $10. And that’s helping this network effect a little bit.
And then the other thing I’m doing to try to drive urgency is I’m doing tiered orders, order pricing, so the first 100 will be 15% off. The second 100 will be 10% off. And the third 100 will be 5% off. And after that, it goes up to full price and I’m setting the bar that this price will never be lower again. We’ll never discount it below that price. And so, that drives urgency of if you want the best price, you better get in there right away.
And then the other layer of that is I’m saying, “The link to order will go out to our email list 2 hours before it’s going to be posted on social media.” So, again, if you want to be able to lock in that lowest price, you should be on the email list to get the link right away. And again, I’m being transparent. That’s going to be out there for everybody to see weeks ahead of time.
And then the mechanics of the order, I’m making… There’s so many things in this. There’s does it pass through safety requirements, what do the size charts look like, how many do I need, what if I need to use a PO? All of these things are baked into kind of a difficult purchasing process. And people want to be fast on a preorder and I don’t want to have to go back and edit all of these orders manually later with a bunch of emails. So, I’m putting out a series of emails to my list, and videos to the Instagram following, of here’s what to expect on launch day, and this is starting two weeks ahead of time. Just a series on pricing, a series on the preorder timing, a series of what if we fail. Here’s how everything works. And by the way, did you get the sizes yet from your other lab mates? Because you don’t want to go to order yours and not remember the sizes that your lab mates needed, so make sure you have everything ready ahead of time so you can order immediately when you get to the page on launch day before everyone else gets access to it.
Kurt Elster: How did you think of everything in advance? I’ve been involved in so many of these. I wouldn’t have thought of half the stuff you have. I mean, this is really quite brilliant. What was the inspiration here? Have you done this before? We just don’t know?
Derek Miller: This is my first time. And yeah, the preorder is not gonna go live for four to six weeks still, so it’s… It was just a lot of sitting down and thinking through the process. A lot of time spent at coffee shops. And going through the mechanics. I think you really have to go through and make the order yourself and see what do I need to know. The beta tester group helped a lot because I made them place an order on Shopify so that I’d get all their shipping instructions in there, and get the logistics handled all through the Shopify admin, and so I worked out some kinks there. And then you need your abandoned cart emails, you need your post-purchase flows, everything else set up for the preorder.
Because they can cancel their order after the preorder until it ships, so you also need to retain those orders for the three to six months until the product actually gets to them. And so, I just really have to sit down there and focus and think through every piece of it as you go.
Kurt Elster: Do you have other advice that you would give to other Shopify entrepreneurs that are looking to take this approach of crowdsource and crowdfunding for product launches?
Derek Miller: Sure. Yeah. I don’t think you can do any of it unless you have a good community and goodwill in that community, and I think I earned a lot of that up front with those fundraisers. That helped a lot. And otherwise, I haven’t been the most active person on social media, but by taking kind of a fan-first approach, I’m trying to do things… I’d say the biggest strength of my business is solving problems for the customers. But I want to solve problems with them, not for them, and get… It’s a discussion as we’re going through these and making these products. Not… I’ve done the tada, here’s the new thing before, and it does not work that well.
And so, I’ve changed that process. I would shout out one of the books that I think would be really helpful in this is the book Superfans, by Pat Flynn. He’s a little bit more in the online course and coaching space, but I think the advice there is really valuable for eCommerce entrepreneurs also. Just building this base of getting people from just being passive customers to being really invested in your brand and the success of the products. Make things that people love and they will support you and help you with it.
Kurt Elster: It’s true. It’s fantastic advice. The thing I hope people take away is the amount of time you invested in understanding the customer, building the relationship, and then in doing so, then finally hyping things. But always being entirely candid, authentic, and honest, and that system works. You can be completely not a scumbag and still be very successful.
Derek Miller: I think it… Another layer of that is it works better for me. I’m more of a technical person. I hate selling. I hate doing sales. I hate asking people to buy anything. And I do all my own marketing. And so, I don’t want to do marketing. I don’t want to get on Instagram and ask people to buy things. And so, that really resulted in me not being very active for a long time. But when you just start telling them about what you did with the design, about… And you’re just transparent and honest the whole time, it’s much easier than sitting there and trying to come up with some clever pitch that’s going to hook somebody into buying.
Kurt Elster: The last thing I wanted to talk to you about is I noticed that on your site near the bottom it makes reference to Shopify Planet. And that came up in a recent episode, as well. What is Shopify Planet doing for you?
Derek Miller: Shopify Planet is pretty new, and I think I’m probably one of the earliest adopters. So, again, most of my customers are in the STEM fields. A lot of scientists. And tend to be a very climate change focused, conservationist crowd. They really care about not only the planet, and climate change, and things like that, but they also care about… They’re very skeptical of a lot of the schemes that are coming up around that, right? So-
Kurt Elster: As am I.
Derek Miller: What’s that?
Kurt Elster: I said as am I. Fundamentally, if I am successful at my job at this podcast, more stuff gets shipped more often as a result. Well, that has a very real cost to the environment, and it keeps me up at night. At the same time, I am also inherently skeptical because I’m on the receiving end of stupid pitches all day. And so, I’m skeptical of these carbon offset programs. I want them to work but I also don’t want to get conned. And so, to hear that you have found one that you believe in is exciting. Is that the case? Shopify Planet, this is the one you can get behind?
Derek Miller: Yeah. And I’d say generically anything that just says we’re gonna plant a bunch of trees, I would stay away from that. That’s been shown over and over again not to be helpful and largely a scam. Shopify Planet takes what I think is a pretty good approach, and I’ve shared this with my audience. I said, “Here’s Shopify Planet. What do you think? Here’s where I’m skeptical. Here’s where I believe in it. Here’s why I think it’s good even though we don’t think it solves the problem.” And I’ve tried to be very transparent about how that works.
And so, what it does is it calculates the shipment, like how far is your package going to be shipped and how heavy it is, and then what’s the carbon emissions coming from that shipment, and then how much does it cost to offset those carbon emissions. And everything is really exact, I think, and precise, until you get to how much does it cost to offset those emissions. And that’s a big, wide open question, but Shopify put together what they call the Shopify Sustainability Fund, and it’s not just paying people to plant trees. It is investing in early stage startups that all have very different ways of pulling carbon out of the atmosphere.
And again, I was transparent with my audience. You know, probably three quarters of these companies are going to fail, but all it takes is a handful of them to succeed, and they’re at that stage where they really, really need that early stage funding to get from lab scale to commercialization and to really demonstrate the technologies.
And so, Shopify Planet lets you put a badge on your website, like on your product page, that says carbon neutral shipping by Shopify Planet. And it gives you an option of you can choose the lowest tier of, “I just want to cover the costs of my shipment in carbon,” and that’s really inexpensive. It’s like 5 cents maybe for a four-ounce package. Or you can say, “I want to double that cost or triple that cost.” And I chose triple that cost because I’m still not convinced that the minimum is cutting it. And again, it’s like 15 cents per order.
It's really inexpensive. It’s really easy to do. I would be transparent with your audience about what it’s doing, but the key thing for me is it’s funding early stage research, which is something that I believe in, something my audience believes in, and I know as a net it’ll be a positive, even though some of this money is not going to go where it needs to be and some of those startups are bound to fail.
Kurt Elster: You know, a healthy and positive way to look at it. I’ll put that one in the show notes, as well. Tap or swipe on the show art. But if you just search Planet in the Shopify app store you’ll find it right away. All right, coming to the end of our time together. What’s next for Genius Lab Gear after this successful lab coat crowdfunding campaign?
Derek Miller: Wow. It’s pretty far ahead to think of that, honestly. The crowdfunding campaign is going to take a few months, and then get the first orders. Once we really get the first couple thousand lab coats out there, that’s where we… The design process is never done. 30 people can give us their feedback in the beta tests, but then now we have 2,000 people to give us their feedback, so I plan on just continuing this. I’m gonna have a detailed feedback form for the average, everyday customer to tell us what’s wrong with our lab coat instead of telling us what’s wrong with their lab coat. And then we’re gonna keep iterating and make different lab coat designs for different scientists, kind of like we did with the pocket cards, and then try to really break into the industry.
The wholesale market, a lot of these are locked up in long-term contracts through wholesale channels, and that is the most difficult thing to break into, but I think if we get that customer testimonial, that social proof that says this is the best lab coat at this price point that’s out there, then I think it’ll be a lot easier to break into those bigger markets.
Kurt Elster: I hope you become the Carhartt of lab coats and then in 10 years it crosses over to the mainstream, and there’s gonna be kids running around in Genius Lab Gear, Beyonce’s supreme collab lab coats. It’ll be the hottest streetwear trend.
Derek Miller: That is the dream.
Kurt Elster: All right, so where can we go to learn more about you?
Derek Miller: The website is just GeniusLabGear dot com. If you do that slash LCP you’ll get to the landing page for the Lab Coat Project, and there you can find those articles that I talked about that we wrote specifically for getting picked up by PR and media. You can see the survey is right there. You can take it yourself, see what’s involved in gathering that kind of feedback. And that’s really the heart of the project and where I’d love people to go.
Kurt Elster: Fantastic. Derek Miller, Genius Lab Gear, appreciate your time. Thank you, sir.
Derek Miller: Thanks, Kurt. Been great.